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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21316 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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So yes, they're dangerous enough that you'd want to grow, and a sufficiently advanced civilization can also harden itself. Both can be true.

But there's no evidence that hardening against RKVs requires K2 levels of energy. If the Sierra Club's lawsuit against the Dyson sphere succeeds, we're not doomed to be struck by RKVs. Furthermore, as discussed previously (and also below) a Dyson sphere isn't even the best method of energy collection.

It's worse than trying to blow up an asteroid with a nuke, because the debris cone can do nearly as much damage as the intact projectile.

If you are really worried about this, you can use a laser or similar system to ablate them so you can move them off-course in a predictable way.

A Dyson swarm has to dump waste heat somewhere.

Yes, and from what I understand, it is also unstable if sufficiently dense.

That is a ridiculous amount of engineering effort, for not very good reason.

This also describes a Dyson swarm to begin with. If you're going to go to a ridiculous amount of engineering effort, for not very good reason, you may as well keep going!

GAH only needs one civilization, anywhere, in the entire history of the observable universe, to launch them.

No it doesn't. Self-replicating devices with short doubling times already exist, but they have not eaten the observable universe despite trying. In addition, plenty of things with (probably) much lower floors for "happening" haven't happened.

But what would I actually do? Walk there. It's 10 seconds away.

Notice that you employ this argument selectively: civilizations will build Dyson swarms because it's the best idea, but launch VNRs even though it's a TERRIBLE idea. But maybe we live in a universe where the opposite happens: civilization don't launch VNRs because it's a bad idea but they don't make Dyson swarms, either, even though it's a good one.

The strength of GAH is that the absence of the signatures it predicts genuinely is strong evidence, because the assumption set is minimal. All you need is: STL interstellar travel is possible, and at least some civilizations will use available resources over geological timescales. That's it.

For the GAH to tell us anything about the universe, it specifically requires assuming that technological progress will arrive at "can build Dyson swarms" and stop there. If it turns out that the most efficient way to harvest energy is by the care and feeding of your own black hole then we'd never notice the stars being blotted out.

And yeah, I'd bet that the black hole is actually preferred by truly advanced civilizations:

  • you're not stuck to a star (it's mobile)
  • inherently scalable
  • occasional lawsuits from the bereaved kin of the sphagettified will not fail as a business strategy, whereas the environmental lawsuits from darkening the sun will not
  • much more efficient energy extraction process

So yeah, if we just assume advanced aliens prefer to use more efficient energy gathering methods then we won't observe them (or at least not by looking for stars being eaten). Waste heat isn't hard to move around (or put to work) so I am not sure we'd see that, or even know if we did see it (my understanding is that there are plenty of odd IR signatures in space.)

Now, maybe it turns out that artificial black holes are ~impossible to create (right now our estimates are that creating one artificially would be extremely difficult) but if it's doable then you would expect that to be preferred.

The fewer joint assumptions, the better the explanation, and "no one is here yet" is just the cheapest fit.

I tend to agree that it's the cheapest fit, I just don't find the GAH very persuasive, because it seems to me there is a lot of uncertainty around it, and from what I can tell about our own future trajectory as a species, we are not on the path to creating the technosignatures in question.

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